Brother MFC-5890CN All-In-One Inkjet Review

There is growing interest in inkjet all-in-ones that can handle both A3 and A4 documents, and Brother have several models that can more or less do this. More or less, because on this model of the MFC-5890CN, the A3 support only extends to printing. The device’s scanner is an A4 device, so A3 scans and copies are off.

As you can expect with the larger paper capacity, this is no small machine. However, Brother has managed to design it so that it doesn’t take up much more desk space than a typical A4 machine. Running top to bottom, the unit has a fairly tall automatic document feeder (ADF) at the top with a fold-out input tray that juts out at an oblique angle when open.

Below that is a sloping control panel at the front with all the usual controls. On the left are dedicated fax buttons, a number pad for dialing, the machine’s LCD display, mode buttons, menu navigation, and finally four buttons for black and white and color copying, job cancellation, and sleep mode.

As is now common on Brother machines, the LCD display is double-wide, which is particularly helpful when printing from memory cards – all popular types are supported – as you can see a thumbnail of the image and a menu of options at the same time.

The single paper tray can hold 150 sheets of paper and doesn’t have a built-in sheet feeder, but it does have a slide-out base and top cover, so you only need to enlarge it when printing on A3 paper. If most of your work is A4 or smaller, the tray doesn’t protrude from the front of the MFC-5890CN at all.

Brother doesn’t seem to have found out where sockets are conventionally positioned. The phone line and handset connectors are located on the back on the left next to the power outlet. USB and ethernet sockets are tidier but less convenient as you have to fold up the scanner area and run the cables through a duct to a position just behind the control panel inside the machine.

The company does much better with the ink cartridges, all four of which are inserted behind a fold-down cover to the right of the paper compartment. A one-off loading cycle then makes the machine ready to print within a few minutes.

The included software includes Brother’s MFL-Pro software suite, which takes care of scanning and uploading images from memory cards, as well as printing and OCR via the Nuance PaperPort 11SE.

As usual, the print speeds seem to have been plucked from the ether, with Brother claiming 35ppm for black and white printing and 28ppm for colour. Even in draft mode, which btw prints better than some and is probably usable for internal documentation, we can’t see how you could achieve these speeds.

In our tests, a five-page black text print took 1 minute 14 seconds, which translates to 4.05 pages per minute, and when we ran the 20-page test, which helps reduce processing time, the speed only jumped to 4.53 Pages per minute, about one-sixth the maximum rated speed. Our five-page text and color graphics print took 1 minute 55 seconds, or 2.61 ppm, so for all normal A4 pages the MFC-5890CN is slower than some of its direct competitors.

When printing A3 pages, the device is proportionally slightly faster. A five-page text print was completed in less than two minutes, and the corresponding text and color graphics page took just under three minutes.

Photo prints were also more on par with competing devices. The Brother printer produced a 15 x 10cm photo in 3 minutes 46 seconds in the highest photo mode, but in standard photo mode it took just 1 minute 39 seconds and there is very little visible difference between the two. Printouts from an SD card and from the device’s PictBridge socket each took 1 minute 42 seconds. A borderless A3 photo took a coffee break of 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

Print quality is reasonable for text, with only a small amount of unevenness visible around curved characters. Color graphics were also reproduced reasonably well, albeit without much life in the colors. Registration of black text over color is good.

A single sided copy from the scanner glass shows some loss of color making the copies look even more flimsy, but the result is serviceable. Photographic prints are reproduced well, with natural colors and high levels of detail, although overall they’re not quite as realistic as the best offerings from Canon or HP.

Scanning photos to a PC shows the same lightening of tone as copies, although the surprisingly high optical resolution of the scanner head of 1200 x 2400ppi ensures good levels of detail.

The four ink cartridges are the only consumables on this machine and we found them at prices putting the cost per page at 2.68p for black and white and 6.10p for colour. Black printing costs are about average for a machine in this class, but color costs are a few pence per sheet lower than most of the competition, giving good overall economy.

“‘Verdict”‘

Brother’s MFC-5890CN is a worthwhile all-in-one workhorse from a company that’s a growing force in business multifunction devices. It’s better suited for someone who needs the occasional A3 print than someone who prints A3 materials on a regular basis, and you’ll have to look for another model if you want to scan or copy in larger format.

points in detail

• print speed 7

• functions 8

• value 8

• print quality 8

characteristics

To press

to scan